Midnight Musings
by melindaWRITER
Summary: Kate Beckett hates being alone and there is one person who always makes it better.


Disclaimer: I do not own anything remotely recognizable in this story. Characters and events are property of their rightful owners. All original ideas and content are the property of the writer

Katherine Beckett loved New York City. She loved how she always had somewhere to go, should she find herself pacing around her apartment at 3:00 in the morning. She loved how she was never walking the streets alone during her very early morning voyages to work or her even earlier treks home from work at uncivilized hours of the night. She loved her job, how the precinct was always open, how there was always someone else there working on a case, how there would always be someone there if she came in to work at any time for any reason. Kate loved how her building had a doorman, like many other apartment buildings, so she knew that whenever she came home there would be someone waiting for her. It made her feel safe and protected, like she was never alone, but once she stepped off the elevator and walked down the hallway into her apartment she was violently slapped in the face with the one feeling that she had been shoving into the back of her brain all day: loneliness. And Kate Beckett hated it, which was probably why she loved the business of New York City. It provided her a substitution, and, in all honestly a band aid, making Kate tell herself over, and over again that she could not possibly be lonely surrounded by all of these people. But it was becoming increasingly difficult for Kate to tell herself this, she had tasted what it felt like not to be alone anymore. She finally had a partner at work, someone who was at the same intellectual level as her and, although she would never tell him or anyone else this, someone she didn t mind being that. Someone who she loved being around and someone whose company, as a result of her suddenly insufferable aversion to loneliness, she began to crave.

Kate had friends and she had had more than friends before, but no one like Richard Castle. When she was with him he made all the hurt that she had go away. He filled all the wholes in her heart that, her dead loved ones had taken when the left her. He made thoughts of her mother, not disappear, but turn into happy memories instead of unbearable, anguishing pain. And believe it or not, being alone in her apartment was becoming less and less intolerably lonely for Kate. Ever since that night a few years ago when he came to protect her from a serial killer who was obsessed with Nikki Heat, she was slowly coming to realize that Richard Castle was a short phone call away. No matter what, she could count on him showing up at her door in a matter of minutes if she called. He responded to her every _beck and call_.

Kate suddenly woke up from her musings and her daydreaming and laughed at her own joke. She got up and purposely walked over to her book shelf and picked up one of her favourite books. Hell Hath No Fury by Richard Castle. "_One of my truly lesser works"_And, returning from the echoes of the author's words inside her head to her thoughts from before, if she wasn t desperate enough to call him she could always read one of his books.

Kate sat down on her couch and gently put her finger over the author s signature. He had found the book on her desk while she was investigating the "Castle Killings". _Ready Or Not, he had written, here I come. With Much Respect, Richard Castle._Kate sighed. He hadn t known at the time how true those words would be and although she was more than a little bit annoyed with him at the time for forcefully letting himself into her life, she was deeply grateful for it now. He had always respected her limitations (to a certain extent) but most of all he had always respected her feelings. And whenever Richard Castle showed up to her apartment unannounced now, she was always, secretly (or so she thought) grateful.

But it wasn t a secret to Richard Castle, despite her show of annoyance and the her roll of her eyes, a very deliberate act of showing indifference to his arrival. Richard Castle could somehow tell how important his company was to her. And that is why he kept coming back.

A/N: I know it's relatively short but I hope it's not too bad. Please review (and try to be gentle as it is the first piece of writing that I have the courage to make public. Ever.)


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